Queer Privacy

Queer Privacy
Essays From The Margins Of Society
Sarah Jamie Lewis

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To everyone who has been forced to hide who they are from the
world.
CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgements & Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
About This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
About The Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv
Who Should Read This Book? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi
What Is Queer Privacy? by Sarah Jamie Lewis . . . . . . 1
Privacy, Perversion, and Power by Ada Collins . . . . . . 4
What’s In A Name? by Kath Rella . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Exploring Polyamory in Private by Audrey Howard . . . 22
Skylar by Avi Zajac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Privacy On The Margins by Morgan Potts . . . . . . . . . 36
The Myth Of The Anonymous Troll by Violet Hargrave . 42
Digital Security for Trans* Communities by Norman Shamas

& Anonymous Trans* Activists . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Where Do We Go From Here? by Sarah Jamie Lewis . . 58
Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

CONTENTS
Mascherari Press . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

Acknowledgements &
Credits
I would like to thank everyone who reached out to me with their
stories, without you this book would not have been possible.
I would again like to thank Ada Collins, Kath Rella, Audrey Howard,
Avi Zajac, Morgan Potts, Violet Hargrave, Norman Shamas and all
of those contributors who have chosen to remain anonymous.
Front Cover Illustration by Marisa Erven1
1
https://marisaerven.com
About This Book
In this book I present to you a collection of essays written by and
about people who intersect with Queerness.
While there is a trend in modern media to use queerness to just refer
to non-heterosexual sexualities, it is important to state that Queer
as used in this book is inclusive of those who are non-cisgender2
including transgender3 , intersex4 , non-binary5 and and/or two-
spirit6 people.
I am not here to define queerness7 , the entire word to me is a rejec-
tion of classifications and categorizations, but for the purposes of
this book queerness refers to being or being-seen-as non-cisgender
and/or a non-heterosexual.
Even this definition has problems, but what is important is that the
stories told in this book are read, reflected upon and acted upon, to
make the world a little better.
When I was compiling this book and talking with the authors I
found each and every one of their perspectives fascinating, real
and educational. I can promise you that many of the scenarios you
2
Cisgender Person: A person whose gender identity matches their assigned sex at birth.
3
Transgender Person: A person whose gender identity conflicts with their assigned sex
at birth.
4
Intersex Person: A person whose biology does not align with society’s traditional
definition of sex.
5
Non-Binary Person: A person whose gender identity does not fit within the traditional
binary (e.g. man or woman) classification of gender. An umbrella term which includes those
who don’t identify as any gender.
6
Two Spirit is a modern term used by some indigenous North Americans to describe
certain spiritual people – gay, lesbian, bisexual and gender-variant individuals – in their
communities.
7
Many of the authors throughout this book refer to the queer community with their
own terms and acronyms e.g. LGBT, LGBTI, LGBTQ etc. For the most part I have chosen to
retain these to reflect the diversity of terms within the community but they can and should
be read as inclusive of all queer identities.
About This Book iii
encounter in this book will be new to you, they may shock you. I
hope, however, you will stay to listen, understand and then apply
the lessons we can learn from these stories to your own activism,
development or life.
You will encounter stories of domestic violence, societal oppression,
unsupportive families, bigotry and suicide. Sadly these elements
cannot be decoupled from the lessons or from the tales, they are
essential to the wider lessons of this book.
Thank you for reading.

About The Authors
It may come as no surprise that while some of the essays in this
book are associated with a “real” identity, more are associated with
pseudonyms.
While compiling this book, author privacy was a big concern,
many of the stories in this book deal with family abuse, violence,
harassment and many authors were worried that revealing their
identity could result in repercussions.
The stories written under pseudonyms are no less real or conse-
quential than any other. In many cases they are the most powerful
examples of the challenges that the queer community faces when it
comes to privacy.
As such I would ask that any biases you have about anonymity and
truth be put aside, as I present to you the contributors to this book
in their own words:
• Ada Collins was raised in the New York area. They received
a degree from an Ivy League institution, where they greatly
enjoyed the old trees and communal crossword-puzzle solv-
ing around the breakfast table. They care for their two young
children and adore biographies.
• Kath Rella is a 33-year-old bisexual woman from Greater
Manchester, United Kingdom. Currently a full-time carer,
Kath has qualifications in politics and law, sociology, crim-
inology and recently in creative writing. She is an avid film
fan, preferring the darker, non-mainstream side of cinema.
In recent years, Kath has taken up creative writing. Her short
film script, ‘Embrace It’ was a finalist in the 2016 edition of
Follow, and she is currently working on a dark fantasy novel,
Ashes of the Forgotten.
About The Authors v
• Audrey Howard is a graphic designer and sometimes-writer.

When she’s not working, she likes finding new local places
to eat, reading historical romance novels and marathoning
shows on Netflix. Audrey lives in the USA with her partner
and their two cats.
• Avi Zajac loves rabbits, cheesecake, and cute things like
prime numbers, triangles, half diamond lock picks. A queer
and trans/nonbinary nomadic hacker Avi likes to chase after
telephone wires and ride on the Metro’s 7000-series trains.
• Morgan Potts is an angry anarchist queer who writes about
gender and violence. He’s a part-time sex worker and a full-
time sad trans boy. He co-runs a queer boxing group and
a support group for men (trans, cis, and intersex) and non-
binary survivors of sexual violence. He likes plants, sci-fi, and
anti-zionist Yiddish singing.
• Violet Hargrave has spent the last three years combating
internet- based bigotry and abuse, working with numerous
non-profits, activists, sociologists, and non-profit organiza-
tions, in addition to her own extensive investigations into
the organization and recruitment efforts of numerous hate
groups. She always writes under a pseudonym.
• Norman Shamas is an activist and educator whose work
focuses on human-centered information/digital security and
privacy.

Who Should Read This
Book?
As a queer privacy researcher, who at other times has been a
software engineer and a security engineer I think that everyone in
all of these areas should read this book.
Queer People: This book contains some of our stories, some will
feel familiar others might seem alien, but they are all part of our
shared marginalization and it is important that we understand the
challenges we face, as well as the challenges of others.
Software Engineers / Security Engineers: We need to build better
tools, we need to build better community engagement. We can’t do
either until we understand the challenges they face. This book is
one attempt at building a bridge between the communities to foster
collaboration and empowerment.
Everyone Else: The stories and essays presented in this book are
about people, who live on this planet with you. People who face
challenges that you might never have thought about. The first
step in making this world more fair, more equal and more free is
understanding each other.
What Is Queer Privacy? by
Sarah Jamie Lewis
Nothing About Us, Without Us.
Privacy is the right to consent.

Privacy is the right to withdraw consent, to only provide informa-
tion to the people you want to provide it to, when you want to
provide it.
The modern debate around privacy has been focused on its con-
tention with security, and framed to be about terrorism and crimi-
nality.
Lost in this debate are the very real day to day battles that we
all face. Employees searching for new jobs without telling their
boss, teenagers hiding partners from their parents, choosing what
information to reveal on a dating profile; the list of times we actively
choose what to reveal about ourselves is practically endless.
Those scenarios take on more serious tones when we discuss
marginalized populations: people of color, native indigenous peo-
ples, queer communities, sufferers and survivors of domestic vio-
lence as well as disabled people, undocumented immigrants and
others who dwell outside of the typical presented “norm”.
While every population intersects with every other, these are not
distinct groups but part of the overlapping spectrum of humanity, I
want to focus on a particular intersection, those who intersect with
queerness.
Human sexuality and gender is complex and complicated and
in many parts of the world non-normative behavior is heavily
stigmatized and actively oppressed.
What Is Queer Privacy? by Sarah Jamie Lewis 2
Those who are queer still date, they still love, they still live, but
many do so under constant fear, doubt, dread, anger and sadness.
I believe that the privacy and security community can build tools
to make the lives of those who intersect with queerness better.
I also believe that to do that we need to understand those lives. We
need to understand exactly what queer privacy is.
And finally I believe that this movement must be driven and must
involve those within the queer community. Nothing about us,
without us.
Many modern companies and organizations promote software to

keep you and your data private. These tools are awesome and the
world is a better place because they exist.
However, these tools are not perfect. Reading any study about
how queer communities use these tools you will quickly discover a
pattern, they don’t.
Much of the modern rhetoric around these tools is focused on state
surveillance. Queer communities often wish to hide things from
some of their family and friends, while also being able to share parts
of their life with others.
Making friends, dating, escaping abusive situations, accessing health-
care, exploring themselves and others, finding jobs, engaging in safe
sex work are all aspects of queer lives underserved by the modern
privacy community.
Many people within the security community reject the need to
focus on threat models centered around domestic violence or online
dating. They choose to see these as “non-technical”, “not-infosec” or
simply “not-interesting”.

What Is Queer Privacy? by Sarah Jamie Lewis 3
Because of this we have been forced to adapt less secure tools to

our own threat models and, as illustrated by this book, with limited
success.
This is a status quo which cannot continue. If the goal of technology,
and by extension securing technology is to make the world a better
place, then we must also make sure to better the lives of queer
communities as well as other marginalized peoples.
Queer Privacy, therefore, is about understanding the challenges

and abuses of power impacting queer lives. Queer Privacy is about
educating a new generation of activists to see these threat models
as legitimate and worthy of research and respect. Queer Privacy is
about building tools to destabilize and destroy the status quo which,
at best, ignores and, at worst, out right oppresses people whose only
crime is trying to live in world that believes their sexuality and/or
gender identity is illegitimate.
This is Queer Privacy.

Privacy, Perversion, and
Power by Ada Collins
Sex is the easiest escape, though my “sex” may not be the sex you
picture.
I wake up at 6:15, feed the kids and drop my kindergartener off. I

head home with my youngest for an hour. I brush my teeth, wash
my face, and try to put on a bra before climbing into my SUV for
the second drop-off.
Living in the Bible Belt, I gesture at respectability enough to be
ignored most of the time. When I want to be more confident that I
will pass, I wear my “safety earrings,” small gold hoops that don’t
feel particularly feminine to me. Part of my superstition.
I can’t wear clothes in those colors invented just for women.
The sterile lilacs and periwinkles of Land’s End. Wearing signs of
everyday femininity short-circuits my ability to relax. I’m already
prone to anxiety so I do what I can to be at ease with myself.
I do let my female side play on special occasions. When I’m high

on myself in a silky, curve-hugging dress and chunky black heels,
preferably with lots of straps. Adding these to my dark hair and
serious nature, I’m not taken for a girl who doesn’t know what she
wants. The initiated, the miserably unowned, see me for what I am:
a dominant person with an hourglass figure who is happy to inflict
pain on a partner.
Submissive men can be volatile. At first, they tend to quickly despair
of finding a dominant woman to serve, falling into a habit of
Privacy, Perversion, and Power by Ada Collins 5
whining when they’ve only been looking for a few weeks. Intent to
claim their own powerlessness, they imagine any dominant woman
will be able to lift them out of misery and into ecstasy. Of course
there are a thousand ways to make a bad match, and it’s up to the
dominant to show some restraint.
Submissive men say they “just want to obey a woman,” but that is
not slightly true. When a fantasy is refined, alone, over decades, it
hardens into something no human can inhabit. A dominant woman
is treated like an Xbox - a sleek object awaiting someone else’s
script. Dominant women don’t easily accept any kind of insertion.
The art of domination is a creative process, and dominants delight
in surprise. If the submissive simply wants an actress, he’ll have to
hire one.8
I am pansexual9 and non-binary, the most non-identifying identity

pairing. I can date any gender and be any gender. I can choose
to fit in at church, at PTA meetings, and at the ex-in-laws’ fancy
neighborhood Cinco de Mayo party. And when I pass, I can forget
that wearing a cock and fucking men is one of the most disturbing
things I could be doing in my bedroom. Being me doesn’t feel
extraordinary or shocking. Planning kinky events (Who will bring
the 7-layer dip? Who will bring the ropes?) doesn’t feel or look
much different from planning the elementary school Valentine’s
Day dance.
Not knowing that kinky people are as common as a cold, the popular
imagination connects us to serial killings and harm. We are broken
people who break others. We live in the shadows with our sickness.
We should go to great lengths to suppress our sexual natures or else
pay the price like an idolator in the Old Testament. But honestly,
8
known as a pro-domme or a dominatrix.
9
Pansexuality is the sexual, romantic or emotional attraction towards people regardless
of their sex or gender identity.

we’re just a bunch of nerds who find it flattering to be considered

so exciting.
Nearly all acts of BDSM can be considered illegal, putting kinky
people in danger of not only smear campaigns and loss of em-
ployment and child custody, but also jail time. So, yes, most of us
exist in secret spaces under scene names. Because we can’t trust
the police or legal system, dungeon owners and scene guardians
keep watch over what happens in public play spaces. Logging into
FetLife, you will encounter entreaties to reverse banishment from
local play spaces and parties. Most cities have only one club, and
being blacklisted means you might never play in that town again.
I am a single mom to two young kids. Yes, I mop up spilled yogurt

and search for lost swim goggles. Yes, my car looks as though we
eat three meals a day inside it. I change diapers, heal goldfish (both
real and imaginary), and bake muffins. I send chili to church for sick
acquaintances, read the same book over and over to the toddler, and
stay up late assembling doll houses on Christmas Eve. It’s lovely,
exhausting, and if you need to be told, incredibly stressful.
Sex is the easiest escape, though my “sex” may not be the sex you
picture. I’d specify that what you call sex is merely “PIV” sex, for
“penis-in-vagina.” There are so many ways to have sex, and so many
body parts, both biological and prosthetic, to engage. I know I’ll
never get to everything on my kinky bucket list. The abundant, yet
specific, nature of my kinky desires comforts me.
Some of my play partners never see me undressed. None of them
are given my name. My face doesn’t appear on my dating profiles,
I use multiple email addresses and messaging apps to protect my
legal name and privacy.10
10
(Of course, I am also protecting the fantasy of me. My suitors don’t want to confront
domestic me.)

Without even a face on a profile, first dates are common and brief.
We meet in public, somewhere I’m not known, for about an hour. I
can always extend the time, but my date can’t. I can break my rule
of never playing on the first date, but my companion had better not
ask.
My dates always want to know my criteria, as if it will be so
different from vanilla dating. My play partners must be intelligent,
respectful, and trustworthy. It’s disappointing when I have to say
no to someone I like because I can’t trust them. A mention of guns,
poor treatment of previous lovers, or paranoia about doxxing11 ends
our evening.
I have enough of a system in place to constitute a superstitious
practice. I know it won’t absolutely protect me. I prefer to be at
ease rather than focus on how to be more careful. I could hide my
license plate. I could refuse to give a photo of my face.12 But I want
to feel in control, and that requires a bit of faith.
I can’t have any fun if I don’t allow myself to trust my partner. I
know I will eventually move on. I can’t put myself in the position
of worrying about revenge. In my BDSM practice, I break open my
partners to ransack their emotions and long-feared desires. Some
men aren’t strong enough to endure it. Some are, but then feel
used when it’s over. (Women seem less dangerous this way, perhaps
because women are allowed to submit sexually.) I have to choose
the strong partners who understand themselves, both because they
are more fun and because they are less likely to throw me across a
room or pay for a private investigator to look into my identity.
The screening, the apps and second name allow me to be fearless
in my Sadistic practice. I am free, I am myself, I am perfect during
11
Editor’s Note: Doxxing (or Doxing) is the practice of discovering & broadcasting
private, sensitive identifying information about a person or group usually with the intent
of harming them.
12
Of course it’s a photo that isn’t anywhere else on the web. The devil is in reverse-image
search!

a play session. I control my partner, I hurt my partner, and I am

bursting with joy and arousal.
North Carolina had its conservative turn four years before the
rest of the United States, culminating in an emergency legislative
session which created House Bill 2 (HB2), an overreaching law
designed to strip us of many civil rights, especially our right to
choose a public restroom based on our gender. Now, when you are
in North Carolina, you must use the restroom that agrees with your
birth certificate. I’ve seen citizens policing each other’s restroom
choice in bars. It is a threatening act, underwritten by violence.
As Trump became President, North Carolinians welcomed a new
governor who supports a full repeal of HB2. The legislature is still
controlled by a Republican supermajority, so repeal is uncertain.
It often seems that cis people don’t want to be bothered with
our civil rights, and that they just want to get the NBA to stop
boycotting our state. Some cis people heartily enjoy complaining
about the state legislature and don’t seem to remember that gender-
nonconforming bodies are at risk.
A wealthy acquaintance asked me to run for office, and I imme-
diately said no. Other friends independently asked me, and still I
declined and cited my personal life and history. Most of these people
know I am non-binary and queer, but none of them know I am a
Sadist. When I say I can’t take the exposure, they laugh it off, maybe
imagining me smoking pot as an undergrad twenty years ago. They
think they’ll convince me one day.
I am an ethical person, an essential requirement for a Sadistic
dominant. Obviously I like taking charge. I also have a lot of
opinions about government’s role in our lives. Being in public office
would be gratifying, and the idea is hard to resist. I spent four
days psyching myself up to run for a position in city government.

I cycled through all the reasons I must allow this person to run my
campaign:
• If anyone in the kink community recognizes me, it will

probably be a friend who won’t betray my identity.
• No one can prove that I’m kinky.
• The office comes with a small salary. I’m already attending
so many political meetings- why not take a seat at the table?
• Who cares about kink in 2017 anyway? “Secretary” came out
fifteen years ago and Rihanna and Justin Timberlake have
been singing about BDSM for almost a decade.
• A queer, non-binary politician would be great for the city, for
the state, for human kind!
As my imagination brought me to new heights of non-binary

power, it also gave me a glimpse of my downfall. If a malicious
person linked my kinky persona to my legal persona, my children’s
father would have some potent ammunition. Visions of my kids
being ripped away from me in a dark courtroom made me want to
vomit. I can dwell in my fantasies and make some of them come
true, but not this one.
It hurts to see the limits of my power. I have so much privilege,
including my Ivy education, and I yearn to use it to help transgender
and queer people, especially the ones affected by HB2. I reproach
myself for puncturing my reputation and ruining my chance to help.
I’m used to feeling like a bad person because I lust after women,
because I want to control and hurt my sex partners, and because I
was born female. I sift through each encounter and try to erase it,
turning it into something alien to me, but I have a stain that won’t
come out. I am kinky, it’s not just something I did.
Sam Steward, a gay man born in 1909, reveled in male homosexual-
ity. His legacy includes a comprehensive card catalog of his sexual
exploits, a vast collection of homosexual erotica, and a collaboration

with Alfred Kinsey. Steward treated queerness as a vocation at a

time when it was illegal and considered a mental illness. Compared
to the trope of the pre-Stonewall self-hating gay man, Steward’s
courageous devotion to queerness is exhilarating.
Steward’s revolutionary life reminds me that rooting out all traces
of heteronormativity is a worthy life-long project. Misogyny, trans-
phobia, and queerphobia surround us all. As I age, I am able to find
the strength to walk away from these limitations and toward my
unique gender and sexuality.
Sam Steward could never have run for public office. He had to
leave academia when he was outed. Yet Steward’s friendship with
Alfred Kinsey changed the discussion about male homosexuality
permanently. A more careful, more closeted person could never
have assisted Kinsey’s research to the extent Steward did. That
alone is a precious gift to leave at the altar of queerness. Steward’s
name was mostly unknown until the 2011 publication of “Secret
Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo
Artist, and Sexual Renegade,” but with each year, other sexual
deviants find inspiration in this brave, wild man’s personal story.
I have to leave my legacy to others to sort out. I can’t control it by
running for office. I can only embrace my desires and hope I leave a
large enough crack in heteronormativity for others to get a glimpse
of what is possible.

What’s In A Name? by Kath
Rella
It’s awful being forced to hide your true self from others.
What’s in a name? I have two. There’s the name I was born with,
that I use in the real-world. And then, there’s Kath, my online alter-
ego. It would sound strange to many, but Kath is the real me. Online,
I can be who I truly am. Offline, I don the metaphoric makeup and
put on a show.
That’s not always true, of course. Fragments of the real me are
shown to certain people; those who would respect me for who I
am, and who would not hate me for what I am. I’m a bisexual.
My sexuality has been a heavy weight to bear all these years. The
reason for this? My family.
I grew up in a religious environment. My wider family practice a
particularly strict branch of Christianity. Consequently, deviants
such as me are not to be treated with respect. They are to be hated.
I was thirteen, or fourteen before I heard the word “gay” used in
the context which most would understand. Before that, I had only
ever heard other words - “faggot” and “dyke” being the two most
common.
I’m not sure when I realised that I wasn’t the heterosexual girl that
my family life insisted I be. My schoolgirl crushes flitted between
male and female. One moment I would be drawn to Leonardo Di
Caprio, the next I cast more than admiring glances towards Sharon
Stone. There are those who believe that such flirtations with the
same-sex are something people grow out of in time. I never have,
and at this point, I can safely say that I never will.
What’s In A Name? by Kath Rella 12
It’s awful being forced to hide your true self from others. I spent
the majority of my life loathing what I was. Why wouldn’t I? My
conditioning was such that, despite holding no religious beliefs,
feelings of being an abomination remained so deep-seated that
suicide often seemed like an appropriate course of action. Suicide
may have even been safer. I have no idea what vengeance some of
my family would seek against me for defying their God, but I have
no doubt that it would be violent.
Despite my inner turmoil and fear of the real me, I had dabbled in
same-sex activity. Hailing from Greater Manchester, England, the
famed LGBT district, Canal Street, is almost on my doorstep. During
my younger, club-going days, Canal Street offered some relatively
inexpensive establishments perfect for the poor student. The mix
of intoxicants and carefree attitudes of fellow patrons led to me
letting my hair down and relaxing. Over the years, I have woken up
next to a few different women. The seeds of my personal liberation,
however, were sewn online.
My parents, though traditional and working-class, were keen that

I stay on top of emerging tech trends. As a result, I was one of the
first in my school peer group to get an Internet connection.
The Internet became a lifeline for me and remains so to this day.
In addition to my bisexuality, I’m also something of a BDSM
enthusiast. My sexual preferences are far from vanilla. Chatrooms,
websites, and yes, pornography all contributed to helping me cope
with my inclinations and preferences.
There has, rightly, been a lot written about the damaging effects of
porn on the young mind. I dare say that the mainstream industry is
far from a beacon of ethics and morality. Behind the slick produc-
tion values of your average twenty-minute video is a hive of toxic
masculinity. Yet there is so much more beyond the mainstream.

Amateur material and independent studios do produce responsible

pornography, where women are more than a semen receptacle.
On the social side, “Kath” was born in an online game. She was a
hero of Azeroth, in the MMO video game World of Warcraft. The
freedom which comes with being represented by an avatar led me
to experiment with being more open about who and what I was.
It remained a slow process. Like a child learning to swim, I would
dip a toe in and test the waters. Small pieces of my true self slowly
revealed until I realised that unlike my family, most people didn’t
care. Indeed, I met one man who has become a close friend; this
man even encouraged me to invest in the same-sex relationship I’m
in now.
Sadly, The British government have declared a proxy war against

the Internet. They use the moral panic generated by fears over
online pornography, terrorism and other cyber crimes to pass
legislation that threatens the open, accepting Internet that likely
saved my life. This year, the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) came
into effect. The IPA, or Snooper’s Charter, as it is known colloqui-
ally, requires communications providers to store information about
individuals. It matters not whether a person is suspected of a crime.
If you use the Internet in the UK, your actions will be logged.
Furthermore, the IPA bestows the right to snoop on multiple gov-
ernment agencies. Law enforcement, the ambulance services and
even the Food Standards Agency have the right to look at your
browsing history. The government argues that their unprecedented
surveillance powers are responsible, that there is a double-lock in
place before any snooping takes place. Their history in this area is
not encouraging.
A recent Freedom of Information request by the Liberal Democrats13
13
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/25/british-councils-used-
investigatory-powers-ripa-to-secretly-spy-on-public

revealed that local councils have been using the previous RIPA14
laws to spy on citizens for the oh-so-heinous crimes of littering,
feeding the pigeons or putting their bins out on the wrong day. Over
55,000 hours of surveillance has been conducted using legislation
designed to protect against terrorists. Like using a sledgehammer to
crack a nut, such use of surveillance powers is grossly dispropor-
tionate.
RIPA powers were employed by a local authority in Poole to
ascertain whether a family was fibbing about living in a school
catchment area15 . Several councils have even been found to have
used RIPA powers to spy on their own employees, over issues so
utterly ridiculous as where someone parked their car16 .
And if this sounds like a few cases of silliness, Big Brother Watch17
published figures showing that local councils have mounted 8,575
surveillance operations over a two-year period18 .
On average, this means that councils alone have carried out
eleven surveillance operations per day during this time. How
many more operations can we expect to see once the Gambling
Commission is granted access to data? And this is before we even
get to GCHQ19 , and the National Crime Agency.
The argument made by many, that the government is only inter-
ested in serious crime, falls apart when we look at how pre-existing
powers are being used. With such comprehensive access to people’s
personal information, the likelihood of more invasive surveillance
of innocent people only increases.
14
Editor’s Note: Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) is an Act of the Par-
liament of the United Kingdom which regulates the powers of public bodies to carry out
surveillance.
15
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-10839104
16
https://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/TheGrimRIPA.pdf
17
https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk
18
https://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/TheGrimRIPA.pdf
19
Editor’s Note: Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is a British intel-
ligence and security organization responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and
information assurance to the British government and armed forces.

Of course, there are those who believe that if you are truly innocent,
then you have nothing to fear. I disagree. I have a clean criminal
record, and other than acquiring marijuana for recreational use in
my younger days, I have stayed on the right side of the law.
However, as I pointed out above, my wellbeing is dependent on cer-
tain people not being made aware of my sexuality and relationship
status. Looking through the full list of agencies with access to my
data, one does not need to reach the sixth degree of separation to
draw a link to someone who could mean me harm.
Could you honestly say that if you had the potential to

access the personal information of your friends, family,
coworkers, etc. that you could resist temptation?
Even if we trust the government and every single employee of each

and every agency to behave in a responsible manner, can we trust
them with data security?
According to the National Audit Office (NAO)20 , 9,000 personal data
breaches occurred in UK government departments between 2014-
15. Only fourteen were reported to the Information Commissioner.
Under the Data Protection Act21 , Whitehall can decide for itself
which security breaches it reports. The NAO, however, say that due
to the lack of self-reporting, there is no way to ascertain how serious
these breaches were.
We now have to accept that we have an all-seeing government
with access to our most intimate secrets, while simultaneously
possessing a ludicrous laissez-faire approach to data security. It
would not take a rogue employee to put an individual such as myself
in danger; it would simply take a skilled hacker having a lucky day.
It’s not as though data breaches are rare. The website Have I
Been Pwned22 maintains a list of major data leaks posted to public
20
https://www.nao.org.uk/report/protecting-information-across-government/
21
https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/data-protection/
22
https://haveibeenpwned.com/

forums, on the Deep Web, or Pastebin. Millions of users of sites such

as Yahoo23 , MySpace24 , LinkedIn25 ,DropBox26 , Tumblr27 and many
others have been affected by security failures.
And let’s not ignore the “big one” - Ashley Madison. The Ashley
Madison hack28 resulted in an unprecedented amount of personally
identifiable information reaching the wider Internet. Whatever you
may personally feel about adulterers, we cannot hand wave the
destruction caused to familial and working relationships resulting
from the mass extortion attempts of cyber criminals.
I, myself, have been a “victim” of such a hack. I subscribed, for a
short period, to a particular adult site. The data was leaked, and
a few months ago, I received an email demanding payment of 10
Bitcoins (approx. £7,000 at the time) in exchange for secrecy. If I
failed to meet the demand of the blackmailer, they would inform
my friends, family and colleagues of my fondness for glamour
photography.
In this instance, I felt safe to ignore the email. They provided no
information that suggested they had anything more than an email
address. However, if they had access to my full email and phone
records, along with a list of sites I visit, they could have done a
whole lot of damage.
And while you might consider this a one-off, it’s not. Being one of
the more tech-savvy people in my social circle, I’ve become the first
port of call for computer-related queries. Threatening emails such
as this have cropped up from time to time. Targets are often the
most surprising. However, the simple fact is we all have a private
23
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches
24
https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/31/recently-confirmed-myspace-hack-could-be-
the-largest-yet/
25
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_LinkedIn_hack
26
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/hackers-stole-over-60-million-dropbox-
accounts
27
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/hackers-stole-68-million-passwords-
from-tumblr-new-analysis-reveals
28
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach

life. We should all have a right to a private life. Our government

does not feel this is the case.
Since we cannot trust the government to behave responsibly, nor

can we trust them with our information, the only thing we can do
is change our behaviour. This is the antithesis of freedom. Nobody
should feel that they cannot do something completely legal because
the wrong person could gain access to their data. If it is dangerous
for you to out yourself as LGBT, then the sad truth is that the only
way to be safe in Theresa May’s surveillance state is to refrain from
visiting any site that could hint as to your true self; whether it be
porn or even support forums. The freedom that I experienced to
become comfortable with being me does not exist today.
The IPA leads into the Digital Economy Bill (DEB), specifically
Section 3. Under the Digital Economy Bill, commercial websites
that offer adult content will be required to vet the age of UK users.
Any site failing to do so will be blocked behind Britain’s answer to
the Great Firewall of China. While it seems easy enough to block
Pornhub and xHamster, let’s not ignore Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit and
a whole host of other non-adult sites that host pornographic con-
tent. Were the DEB to be enforced in full, it would almost certainly
require virtually every Internet user in the United Kingdom to place
themselves on some sort of register.
The DEB goes further than simply blocking pornography from
people who are unable or refuse to verify their age. It also aims
to prevent people from viewing “unconventional” sex acts. Yes,
the government arbiters of morality have decided that facesitting,
female ejaculation, spanking, whipping, any form of restraint and
various other acts that you can engage in at home are to be hidden

from the apparently feeble minds of British viewers.29

At what point do we allow our government to dictate to us what
type of sex is deemed conventional? The DEB is a direct attack
on those who enjoy BDSM content, and I dare say grossly irre-
sponsible. Have the government considered that responsible BDSM
content providers, such as Kink, depict how to engage in such acts
safely? If public health is their overarching concern, then wielding
the ban hammer against Fifty Shades of Grey would be a more
prudent measure than attacking the websites that have a genuine
interest in responsible portrayals of BDSM.
Censorship only ever begets more censorship. Porn is a soft-tar-
get, as the cries of “think of the children!” echo in the halls of
Westminster. Our desire to protect children from harmful material
overrides our desire to protect adults from prejudicial attitudes. We
have constructed an ideology in the UK that BDSM practitioners
are weird and potentially dangerous. A handful of salacious news
stories about a sexual predator with interest in vaguely termed
“violent pornography” leads to furthering the moral panic, and the
acceptance of such invasive attitudes by our overbearing nanny
state.
However, much like with the IPA, we ignore the real issue. If chil-
dren’s attitudes to sex are being informed by online pornography,
then sex education in the United Kingdom is utterly inept.
Why wouldn’t it be? Under current law, Sex and Relationship
Education is not a mandatory subject. A parent can withdraw
their child from sex education, and many do. Furthermore, when
I was in school, sex education consisted of a few hours of working
29
Editor’s Note: This essay was written prior to March 2017. Since then the UK
Government have debated amending the bill to only legislate to prevent access to “extreme
pornography”.

out what to call genitals so that children would understand. This

was followed by a simplistic rundown of an act we’re biologically
programmed to know how to do anyway.
Discussions on positive body attitudes, gender-specific issues and
everything else that goes into a truly fulfilling, healthy sex life went
completely ignored. Approximately 30% of UK households contain
any children. Many of that 30% will include 16-year-olds. We’re
applying a general law that will affect everyone, which by intent,
should only apply to a much smaller number.
Let’s be brutally honest, here. Children are not as technologically
naive as their parents. They will know how to use a VPN or other
such tools to circumvent the block. The devious ones will even nab
daddy’s credit card while he’s asleep to get their porn fix. Therefore,
it behooves the government not to think in such simplistic terms
but to increase education. Enforce Sex and Relationship Education
in schools, and educate parents on being better net-aware and to
not fear the awkward conversations with their kids.
We must come back to the privacy argument, as well. Adult sites

have shown they’re preferred targets for hackers. In addition to
Ashley Madison, we’ve seen Fling30 , Naughty America31 , xHam-
30
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/another-day-another-hack-passwords-
and-sexual-desires-for-dating-site-fling
31
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/04/14/naughty-america-
fappening-hacked-porn-sites/#69e28f2c714f

ster32 , Brazzers33 , Adult Friend Finder34 , YouPorn35 , Fur Affinity36

and several others hacked. The DEB in its current form provides no
data security criteria.
To block the supposedly “unconventional”, it stands to reason that
each website will need to log what each user views. This is espe-
cially true on porn tube sites like PornHub where so much content
is uploaded, it will be nigh-impossible to proactively filter what is
forbidden by the British government. Therefore, we’ll be creating
a database of UK porn viewers and their viewing habits. This
is another potentially devastatingly short-sighted move to outing
people who are not ready or willing to be outed. Furthermore, since
the law is fluid, the government could quite feasibly ban more acts
and then have a nice little list of people who had previously viewed
them to surveil under their IPA.
The truly dangerous cyber criminals will continue to go about their
business. They’ll switch on their VPNs, use encrypted messaging
services and go underground using Tor37 . The rest of us - the
law-abiding citizens - are the ones that end up living under the
surveillance cloud. Oh, we could turn on our VPNs too, but how
soon is it before the state decides all VPN users are probably
criminals? Wanting to protect your privacy from a government that
I, personally, have no trust or faith in will likely be seen as the
actions of a Person of Interest.
32
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2478759/xhamster-hack-380-000-
accounts-exposed-in-porn-site-breach
33
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nearly-800000-brazzers-porn-site-
accounts-exposed-in-forum-hack
34
http://www.zdnet.com/article/adultfriendfinder-network-hack-exposes-secrets-of-
412-million-users/
35
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/22/youporn-hacked-email-addresses-
passwords_n_1294502.html
36
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/another-day-another-hack-furry-site-
hacked-content-deleted
37
https://torproject.org

Most of us close our curtains every night. We do so not because

we’re breaking laws, but because we have an expectation of privacy.
Whether you’re watching television, playing a video game or
having sex, you tend not to invite the neighbours to stand outside
and gawp. Yet, without consent, the government and its agencies
are forcing their way into our homes.
The Internet of Things ensures that even more of our household
items are online. It’s not paranoia to believe that the information
these gadgets hold about us will be passed on. Furthermore, with
powers under the IPA to monitor webcams, to activate cellphone
microphones and all these other little additions, how long is it
before we’re profiled by an unseen, unaccountable agency? The
ideas of dystopian novels may not be so far-fetched, as it seems
our government have taken them as a manifesto.
As a bisexual, trying her best to live a normal life but knowing I’m
only ever one mistake from potential harm, the direction the UK is
going fills me with dread. By allowing moral panic to decide the
law over reason, the UK is allowing itself to become a near-fascist
state.
I will try to continue as normal. My girlfriend deserves as much.
Yet I do so knowing that any mistake that leads to my outing
may not be mine. All of the assurances of respect for our data are
meaningless when all of the punishments are implemented after
the fact. Regardless of our supposed tolerance, LGBT people still
continue to experience prejudice. Fear exists within the community;
fear of homophobes, of discrimination, and yes, of our families.
Now, people like myself have to fear the government, who are
supposed to be protecting us, because one leak can put us in danger.
Moreover, though, I am mostly concerned about where this may
lead. The UK claims to champion freedom and liberty but if such
an assault against privacy is still regarded as the actions of a free
country, then what other freedoms will be taken away next?

Exploring Polyamory in
Private by Audrey Howard
We have so enjoyed being openly bisexual and polyamorous that
going back to a life of monogamy and hiding who we are seems
almost unthinkable
With everyone’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other profiles

linked to one another, it’s easy to follow along with the lives of
loved ones, old friends and even strangers.
It’s not unheard of for friends and family to find out about new
romantic relationships as they appear online. The relationship
status of people we know can be a source of constant interest and
gossip.
But what about when we have more than one relationship at a given
time? Ethical non-monogamy, or more specifically in my case,
polyamory, is something that has grown in popularity in recent
years.
Polyamory usually refers to having romantic and/or sexual re-
lationships with multiple people at once (with the consent and
knowledge of everyone involved).
Communication, honesty and trust is key in ethical non-monogamy,
and being polyamorous is certainly not a license to cheat.
For most people, the concept of any style of non-monogamy may

be confusing, and for some it may seem nothing short of absurd.
Exploring Polyamory in Private by Audrey Howard 23
However, for my partner and I it is something we find exciting

and desirable as we enter our thirties. This is due partly to the fact
that, in recent years, we have both come to realize we are bisexual.
Discovering this while in a long-term, committed relationship has
been complicated and confusing, but it is something we have both
embraced in ourselves and in each other.
Finding a community of queer women and gender non-forming
people online—particularly on Twitter and Tumblr has greatly
helped me embrace being bisexual.
Chatting to people like me, hearing their stories, seeing them being
unapologetically queer on my timelines every day made it easier
and easier for me to not only accept being bisexual, but to be proud
of it.
Now, being bisexual and being around fellow queer people (even
if only online) feels so normal to me that I can’t imagine life any
other way. And the best part is that I was able to find these friends
and communities in private, away from the potential judgment of
my family or friends.
Beginning to explore your sexuality and identity is such a delicate
process; so delicate that it could only take one question or odd
glance from a well-intentioned but ignorant family member to
totally shatter everything. Social media communities can provide a
relatively private and safe space for people like me to feel welcome,
loved and valid—no matter their identity.
While neither my partner or I have officially come out publicly

about our sexualities, I have told a few family members whom I
trust.
Sadly, my partner’s family are very conservative and homophobic,
so we have been keeping our sexualities and our changing rela-
tionship dynamics private for the most part. Now that we have

started to seriously explore ethical non-monogamy, we have had

to consider a path forward that allows us to date other people while
also maintaining a sense of privacy. This is especially important
while we find our footing as our relationship changes.
Luckily, thanks to dating apps like OkCupid38 and Tinder39 , we have
been able to explore dating new people on our own terms and in a
way that feels comfortable to us individually, and as a couple.
OkCupid has been especially helpful with this. It has the option to
change the settings so your profile cannot be seen by straight people.
We have connected with other ethically non-monogamous people
via these apps, and we have both gone on a date or two.
Traveling overseas has made it easier for us to keep our exploration

of our sexualities and polyamory private. Dating apps use location
based services to connect you with people nearby or in the same city
- this has meant we haven’t had to worry about people we know
back home stumbling across our profiles. Right now, that allows us
a great sense of freedom to be completely ourselves and live openly
with the people we choose to date. We don’t feel like we have to
hide.
But questions loom about what we’ll do once we return home.
Do we delete the apps? Do we remove our profiles altogether and
erase everything we’ve started? We have so enjoyed being openly
bisexual and polyamorous that going back to a life of monogamy
and hiding who we are seems almost unthinkable.
If there was an option to navigate the apps in a way that kept our
profiles private while still connecting with people, we might be able
to make it work. But with location services and public profiles a vital
part of online dating, that seems unlikely.
38
https://www.okcupid.com/
39
https://www.gotinder.com/

Tinder poses a further problem, as it tells you if you have mutual

Facebook friends with a potential match. I have already stumbled
upon a few people who I have mutual friends with. All it would
take is for someone who knows my partner’s family to see our
profiles for our privacy to be snatched away from us and our family
relationships threatened.
To make it even more difficult, most of these apps are free and
publicly accessible. It doesn’t take much effort for someone to sign
up for an account with one of these services and to discover our
profiles. Seeing either one of us on a dating website would rouse
immediate suspicion, and while I’d like to think most people I know
would be polite enough to just ask me about it directly — despite
the fact that, ultimately, it’s no one else’s business — I can’t help but
fear they would draw immediate conclusions. They would assume
that we are cheating on one another.
New relationships can be tricky to navigate at the best of times. For

me, personally, I like for blossoming romances to be private at first,
something special between the two of us. I appreciate having the
time to get to know someone without the opinions of others getting
in the way.
And then there is the question of what to do if either of us fall in
love with someone and no longer want to hide it. How much of our
new relationships do we make public? Friends and family may not
be able to accept this new version of ourselves, but it’s not fair for
anyone to have to hide who we are or who we love.
Maintaining privacy when we go home is going to be complicated,
to say the least. But thanks to the experiences I’ve had on dating
apps and going on dates while overseas, I feel more and more
confident about who I am. With a little more time to explore this
new life privately, I may feel ready to come out and be openly
bisexual and polyamorous. My partner feels the same.

But for the time being, and with the help of dating apps, we are
keeping this part of our lives private - at least for now.
Privacy is something we all deserve, and something we are all
entitled to.

Skylar by Avi Zajac
People want a happy ending.
I distinctly recall the first time I declared myself to be an activist

in elementary school excited about protecting animals. As I grew
older my activism took roots inside of the LGBTQ community and
within human rights organisations. Coming out with my sexuality
sophomore year, as genderqueer in my senior year, followed by
coming out as a trans guy and nonbinary later on - this I did not do
alone.
It was part of a back and forth exchange; shared experiences of
which I am now the sole remaining half. As an activist who
additionally supports transparency, privacy, and anonymity, which
intersect with my queer and trans identity, I am fighting for the
other half to prevent the erasure of our histories and to undo the
failures of the other intersectional communities I belong in.
Through the media we have been conditioned to accept stories
with predictable trajectories and narratives, the ultimate climax of
where the protagonist must do something to challenge the bad in
the world, have it finish in one happy ending.
We don’t like to look at the news and think that a problem won’t
ever fully end nor do many of us think there’s more to the headline
or what the media tells us.
Then there are the topics and subjects we consider too taboo
or sensitive to talk about and are told never speak of it. Topics
like suicide, mental health, domestic abuse and violence, we must
remain silent to preserve the dignity of all parties and respect for
the dead. To argue and fight is to be uncivil and rude.
Skylar by Avi Zajac 28
Across my four years of high school and since then locally and
nationally we heard and seen the news coverage of queer and trans
youth suicides. Transgender Day of Remembrance is one such event
in which we do an annual roll call of trans deaths: share their names,
their photos, if there are any, and their stories.
A week and day after my 18th birthday walking out of AP Com-
puter Science to art class my heart dropped as whispers began. She
was supposed to be in class like the rest of us.
My teacher in the next class got the call eventually.
She jumped.
A few things didn’t happen and certain other things did. Initially
misgendered they corrected the reports and the newspaper cor-
rected themselves. Her obituary claimed she only “passed away
suddenly”. My high school did not offer counselling for any of the
students and there was no talk about suicide prevention. I found out
the truth about what happened in her last thirty minutes through a
few other folks a few weeks after.
We were angry; we were numb; we were heartbroken, but time kept
going and so did we.
Months later the state journal published an editorial where for the
first time we felt an immense sense of helplessness. It featured her
parents who suddenly claimed and presented themselves as having
known her for all of these years. Not only did this piece out her
natal name, it also used the wrong pronouns to start off, and a
slew of claims and outing of her mental and psychiatric diagnoses.
It was a grossly done piece spinning what was supposed to be a
heartbreaking tale on transgender suicides into a transphobic story
of a person I could not recognise in the words. There was nothing
I, nor anyone else, could do to protect her story.
To the world that didn’t know her, she had been all but erased by
her parents. The rest of my senior year was an academic disaster but
I maintained my non-profit and activist work. I pushed my younger

sibling, now a freshman, to join the clubs at school where was on

the leadership team as well as the youth leadership board I was a
member of at the LGBTQ non-profit I had joined my freshman year.
Like activists and as siblings do we had our disagreements on the
various problems we faced. That was okay, I thought, my sibling
just needed time to grow. We had a very rough spring to early
summer together after a falling out over a topic my sibling felt very
strongly about fuelled as an excuse for why my sibling could not
use my correct pronouns. Despite those issues I came out as trans,
we got our dog–Nugget, short for Chicken Nugget–that we bonded
with immediately, then two weeks later my sibling watched me
walk across the graduation stage where we got mac and cheese pizza
together after.
Days later I was on a flight to the east coast leaving behind my
sibling. A month later they also came out as trans and nonbinary.
Came out as Skylar.
I thought I’d never look back.
That wasn’t exactly true for a few different reasons.
Growing up was survival. There were years when Skylar and I

didn’t have anything but boxes, and boxes, of cereal that were long
expired. Everything was expired but it was “okay” to eat it if it didn’t
kill us. We didn’t have booster seats and it was okay to kick us out of
the car while driving somewhere. Just walk home… actually…just
never come back.
Sundays consisted of trying to hide under the bed or in the closets.
Fists, screams, shouts. We wanted to play games on the internet, not
go to a church where hatred was spewed in the pews and gossip.
Being chased. My first memory is one of terror as I tried to hide
under the covers in my bedroom as my birth mother screamed and

pounded her fists, scratching me to get the blanket protecting me,

dragging me into the living room. Fists, screams, shouts. Often my
sibling would blame me for breaking something or doing something
and I’d get the hits for it. I got angry as it wasn’t me but over time
recognised if it wasn’t me it would have been Skylar.
My birth father could not stop any of this. Contrary to the tradi-
tional Korean patriarchal culture my birth mother was the head,
my birth father quiet and meek. Growing up we watched as my
birth mother had issues with alcohol, toxic behaviour, leading her
to being removed from several communities, all the while with her
insistence that she was a strict child of God.
Sure, there were occasionally the good times awarded every few
weeks after the initial abuse, the silence, once in a while the rarely
spoken half apology, as the apology was the good times. The vast
majority of the time was survival and relaxation only if she was
passed out on the couches while the TV was on.
Our approaches to survival were near opposites. My birth mother

had a lot of fantasies, illusions, a sense of self-righteousness, im-
portance, and grandiose. She often talked about having wanted to
be a famous actress with photos and books of Audrey Hepburn and
other actresses around, believed the thousands and thousands she
paid for ballroom lessons and competitions made her elegant and
beautiful. This and other things she tried to push onto us. Skylar
chose to go along and ride it out which led to things like taking
ballroom lessons, dance classes, church, and more…while I refused.
I still ended up doing years of dance myself as my sibling needed
a dance partner. He chose silence in front of her rather than being
authentic. I refused which led to fights with my outspokenness and
refusal to concede by bluntly telling my opinions on things, bearing
the brunt of most of my birth mother’s wrath. My first taste of

freedom was running down my street in the third grade, by the

end of high school I had found my comfort in 24 hour gyms and
coffee shops. It was bad enough when I came out as an atheist and
Skylar as agnostic leading to Sundays as they would. Coming out as
queer was the last straw. Skylar followed me in coming out but, as I
flaunted my identity in front of my birth parents, Skylar remained
silent.
We found solace with each other and on the internet due to the fear,
shame, and humiliation of our lives. Making plans and support for
the other whether it be graduations, escaping our hometown, or
survival.
Escape, get my own place, get custody of Skylar.
The last time I ever texted my brother I hoped xe40 would have a
good school year and to let me know if he ever needed help with
trans health. Eventually I got to the stage where I felt prepared for
having Skylar, buying a Lego set of the Eiffel Tower for xir. At the
time I worked at the airlines and with flight benefits I intended to
reunite, get waffles, and offer him to get onto my benefits, join me
on the east coast and go to France, and if xe wanted me to take
custody of him. After getting sick, the trip was postponed to a week
later, making it 470 to 471 days since I had left.
Monday, 28 September 2015, 468 days since I had left.
I got the call.
The sand in the hourglass that had stopped at 1150 days from 16
years and 10 months prior separating the age difference between
my brother and I began. Skylar had an autopost on xirs Tumblr
account stating his intentions of suicide.
My birth parents were notified hours after I had been but even I had
not been the first to have found out: it was the non-profit we were
both a part of that was informed, first. They were xirs emergency
contact.
40
Editor’s Note: Xe/Xir/Xirs is a gender-neutral third-person singular subject pronoun.

When my birth parents called to reconcile with me I was exhausted

and thankful at the chance of not having to fight legally in the
courts. I flew back the same night, went back to their home, and
immediately took over. Prior to leaving I had them promise me they
would not do the same things they had done to me to my sibling.
This was not the case and even worse: frequently calling the police
on my brother, kicking xir out, and more. The shock of their actions
across the years finally coming into fruition was too much which
allowed me to take over most of the procedures.
On the online obituary they had dead named Skylar with his
full natal name, the wrong age, and terrible bland description. I
completely fixed it, wrote the obituary authentically as possible.
I obliged my birth mother’s insistent request to add “advanced
ballroom” to it even though xe had not done ballroom for years
as it was her thing, not his. The funeral was on Friday a few blocks
from my high school. Inappropriately laughing and saying random
things while folks gave their condolences. Two days later cremating
Skylar’s body. The next day, a week since the nightmare had begun,
I turned 20 years of age and received the funeral bill, ashes, and paid
for the burial lot. Three days of cuddling the urn later we buried
him. I put the first two handfuls of dirt to ensure the rainbow ribbon
from our desk wouldn’t move, the final shovel of dirt, put the grass
layer back on top, and watered it.
In the time I had left my sibling took over from where I left off
and went much farther than I had ever gone as an activist. His
death went national and I was flooded, as the sole online contact,
with messages of condolences and hatred. The media was the point
of anger I held for weeks and even now. Several of them outed
xir, had incorrect information, and even after providing the correct
information or requesting to have things removed they did not
correct themselves. Skylar’s Tumblr note and account went viral,
people began flooding his social media accounts to be added. I found
my own natal name and history in some of these reports, too. Xir
lost his privacy and I did too over my own past.

For years I had participated in events for trans and queer deaths
by suicide, often sharing news articles and media about them
without fully vetting them if at all. Now it was turning onto me
directly. I felt pure anger for the first time in a long time at the
media sensationalising Skylar’s life and death, falsely analysing
and putting into their own narratives and claims of why xe did it,
statistics he did not belong in, everything was an out of control
disaster. People used xir to support their view of trans deaths by
suicide whether it be out of malice or an attempt to do good but only
served to purpose more incorrect information. The world moved on
eventually but it wasn’t the end.
Initially it seemed my birth parents wanted to make up and amend
what they had done. My birth mother said she would become an
activist, that is if activism is lying, false stories of parenthood, and
closeness. At the time I didn’t know they were manipulating me
out of obsession and for a need of control but I also helped enable
them and their behaviour by coaching them how to speak, what to
say, what to write, providing my words to make up for the lack of
theirs. My words have become appropriated in her speeches since.
Facts cannot be changed by disillusion, denial, or grief; facts cannot
be changed by a new public persona and face exuded for acceptance
from a community they said was full of sin and hell because of their
religion, yet facts have largely been discounted by the media and
by national LGBTQ organisations because it is the perfect tragic
sob story. “Wisconsin Mother Calls for Deeper Understanding of
Transgender People”
“Mom of trans kid tells heartbreaking story of suicide”
People and the media want a happy ending to this story. They’ve
accepted this happy ending in the form of a sudden “change of
heart”. False allyship has allowed these voices to override real trans
voices even after being informed of the truth.
Sheer inability for accountability has led to the corrosion of trust
I had for national LGBTQ organisations and groups I formerly

believed in, one such group being the GSA Network who worked
with my birth mother to create the Skylar Lee Leadership and
Activism Award scholarship. Any person who truly knew my
brother would know that xe hated school.
They have allowed my birth mother to use the few old photos she
has with Skylar before he transitioned as her “proof” of closeness,
which further degrades any sense of anonymity or privacy with his
past. She claims to have been an “ordinary mother” until Skylar
came out using false and inconsistent dates. She spreads the same
false narrative of trans people hating themselves and their bodies
using Skylar as her vehicle. Any truly inclusive and trans friendly
organisation or media should recognise that is not okay.
Somehow people have ignored that my birth parents breached
Skylar’s Facebook account and read all of xirs private messages with
people, this alarmed the senders of the messages (as it is terrifying
seeing a dead person suddenly having “read” your message). Per-
haps this ignorance stems from the taboo of speaking against the
family of the dead but our birth parents were never family for us.
Their clear eagerness to tear down the last of Skylar’s privacy
has been ignored and the attempt at erasure of our histories and
lives with a false narrative of “parenthood” seems to at least for
now largely been successful by my birth mother. It did not help
that Skylar tried to prevent a witch hunt on his Tumblr post by
saying xe was not pushed to the edge by family, adding Korean
American culture has become a scapegoat to blame for transphobia
and homophobia, which are legitimate issues that unfortunately he
helped by not being truthful for the sake of trying to not become a
sob story.
The greatest disappointment in all of this has come from people
who intimately have known or know of the truth but say if what
she’s saying is doing good then that’s all that matters. People ignore
her inconsistencies and lies with her narrative, her illusion of a
relationship in which she imagines happened with Skylar (she was

never a mother to us, we were predominantly raised by other

people), history of abuse, because it is for the “greater good”.
People want a happy ending and with my birth mother have been
swayed by her inconsistent sob story as an “ordinary mother” of a
nationally recognised dead trans and queer youth activist: the tragic
story they want to hear. She is being given awards, making speeches
at conferences, and more, all being taken word for word because she
simply happened to be the birth mother of a dead child.
She has forgotten Skylar’s request:
“In conclusion, I am a depressed teen like many others. However,
what I am not, is a sob story. Don’t turn my name into a hash
tag. Don’t treat this like glory suicide-fest. I am not killing myself
because I am trans and queer. However what I do know, is that
when trans and queer kids complete suicide, that there is a chain
reaction. This is only heightened by the media portrayal of us being
sob stories. I am not a sob story, do not turn me into one.”
Skylar and I both made mistakes, terrible decisions at times. Some-
times we were hateful at ourselves, each other, our homes, the
world. Other times we were in love with the world. We were both
trying to survive. Our lives are too complex and intersectional for
clear headlines, easy to understand narratives and trajectories, or
clickbait.
My younger brother may have lost xirs privacy. Yet I am now the
last survivor of shared experiences and I will share our valid and
raw authenticity and histories until my own end.

Privacy On The Margins by
Morgan Potts
Reclaiming my privacy has been important both as an activist and
immigrant, and on a personal level to regain control over my life.
Tech stuff is socially inaccessible to femmes and queers and anyone

who’s not a straight white dude, but we’re using it anyway.
Privacy is especially important for anyone who transgresses social
and political boundaries. People on the margins of society do that
just by existing. State surveillance is everyone’s problem; but it’s a
bigger problem for those seen as threats to the state.
I use encrypted communications to: separate my personal life from
my sex work, and keep myself and my clients safe; communicate
with my fiancé about our marriage and the immigration paperwork;
organize with activists; organize with other sex workers; and sell
hormones to my trans friends who can’t get them through “official”
channels. I also use encrypted messaging to chat with “baby trans”
people who are just beginning to explore their genders and are
nervous about being outed.
My threats as a queer and trans immigrant, activist, and sex worker
are personal and from the US and UK states. I need to ensure
that my communication about activism and political dissent isn’t
too unpalatable for the state, or I risk detention and deportation.
There is a constant underlying threat, and it is very stressful. I’m
about to get married to one of my partners in order to legitimize
my immigration status, which will put us both under extra state
surveillance.
Organizing with activists requires secure channels of communica-
tion. It means keeping information secret from all but those who
Privacy On The Margins by Morgan Potts 37
need to know, and until the moment they need to know it. My
role in direct actions has been one of support, not leadership, which
usually means I hear about the general location of the site a few days
prior, and the exact location less than an hour prior. Some activist
groups I’ve worked with prefer Telegram41 , but I favor Signal42 ,
honestly just on the word of some of my more infosec-experienced
friends.
As a sex worker I’m careful (now) to vet my potential clients to

protect myself (and, less importantly, to protect them). But most of
the violence that sex workers face is at the hands of the police and
the state, not from clients.
The work I do isn’t illegal, but it provokes scrutiny. I also make
an effort to keep my sex work “identity” very separate from my
personal/public identity, by having separate devices and accounts
and photographs for each. I’ve changed my habits on social media,
and now I only post about places I’ve already been rather than
places I’m going to, and at least a day later.
But this isn’t foolproof. Once a client asked how I was and, feeling
particularly proud of myself I said I was great because I’d just been
published in the Guardian (under my real name). He shamelessly
said he knew, and proceeded to tell me all about the topic without
realizing how uncomfortable and dangerous that it was for me. He’s
now been blacklisted on workers’ forums for being a disrespectful
creep (if you’re reading this, Rob, get lost).
Being trans and queer and a sex worker also makes me vulnerable
to personal attacks from strangers and radical “feminists” on the
internet. I’m careful to protect my personal information so that the
41
https://telegram.org/
42
https://whispersystems.org/

transphobic, queerphobic, whorephobic abuse I get is limited to my

public online accounts and doesn’t bleed into my physical reality.
Trans people are consistently denied access to healthcare in the UK.

There are lots of online support groups which have varying levels of
privacy and anonymity, and the most-discussed topics are how to
navigate the healthcare system to get access to hormones and other
gender-affirming treatment.
I use Signal, an end-to-end encrypted secure messaging app, to
discuss hormones with trans people who are struggling to get them
on the NHS. If I’m careful, I’m able to get testosterone for my
friends who need it but can’t get it because the NHS is too slow
and dismissive, and the costs of private care are too high.
We also use encrypted chat to discuss forging documents that assist
in changing gender markers or convincing GPs to give them a
“bridging” prescription while they wait on the NHS. People are
very resourceful. This can slash the wait time for people getting
on hormones from several years to a few weeks.
I’ve had many closeted trans people message me semi-privately (on
insecure channels like facebook messenger or twitter DMs) about
their genders and transness. Like me, in the past, their primary
threat isn’t the state but rejection by their immediate social group;
they don’t care if the state reads their messages about gender feels
as long as their parents and partners don’t find out.
They use the internet as a safe space to explore their gender
identities and get peer validation. Every trans person I know has
agonized about medically transitioning because we’re afraid it will
warp our personalities and make us eternally unattractive; it’s
extremely comforting to talk to someone who’s already undergone
treatment to hear that this isn’t the case. Then there are just as many
people who need to hear that they don’t have to do any medical

transitioning to be trans, and they need not aspire to a binary or

traditional gender expression. So we have transition-related forums,
selfie-appreciation groups, and threads about how to fuck and love
trans bodies.
For a long time the threat for me wasn’t just the state, or iden-
tity thieves; more than anyone else it was my partner. For three
years I was in an abusive relationship where my then-boyfriend
cyberstalked me. He used our shared network to get access to my
browser history. He would use that information to pretend he knew
me better than I knew myself, and to exploit my fears. He also used
a keystroke program to get my email password and therefore all
my social media passwords, and made my email account passively
forward him every email I sent and received.
He regularly looked at my phone too. None of my written commu-
nication was private; if I wanted a private conversation I needed to
call people or speak to them in person, but of course my boyfriend
curbed my social life by undermining my self-esteem and explicitly
forbidding me to talk to some of my friends.
He blocked my ex’s friends from my facebook account in a fit
of jealousy and it felt less embarrassing to let them believe that
I impulsively cut them out than to tell them the truth about my
controlling boyfriend.
I now use two-step verification wherever I can, a password manager
with unique and high-entropy passphrases, and I have a strong
passphrase on my hard drive. Reclaiming my privacy has been
important both as an activist and immigrant, and on a personal level
to regain control over my life. It’s been empowering to realize that
tools and methods which my ex used against me can be frustrated
and blocked with tools of my own. Now my ex would need access
to my phone (which is encrypted with its own passphrase) in order

to gain access to my email or social media accounts. My confidence

in my privacy from the prying eyes of the state is medium to low,
but at least I’m fairly confident that my abusive ex can’t track my
movements across the city anymore—and if he did, my friends have
bats at the ready.
Convincing my friends and clients to use secure channels for

communication has been a challenge: not because they’re lazy or
they don’t have a stake in it, but because everything tech is still
extremely inaccessible to people who are aren’t already steeped in
it. The learning curve is high, and the culture around computer
science, coding, and information security is still misogynistic and
queerphobic. Women and femmes need to prove themselves in a
way that men don’t. Older people (most of my clients) are justifiably
intimidated by it. Even writing this article now, I feel like a fraud
because I don’t have fully-blown expertise in surveillance self-
defense. I’m still learning about threats to my security, and how
to manage the threats that I already know about.
I’m trying to change that in the small ways that I can by employing
good practices and encouraging my friends and family to do the
same.
Earlier this month43 I ran a diceware skill-share workshop in my
living room. We set up strong passphrases on our accounts and hard
drives, and installed Tor browser44 and Signal. My white suburban
mom is using Signal now, in solidarity with me and other people
who need to disappear into the Signal crowd lest using it becomes
a way to identify “undesirables”. My friends and I have “email
encryption and tea” meet-ups. The sense of camaraderie among
privacy activists is really encouraging and heartwarming. I highly
43
This article was submitted to Mascherari Press in December 2016.
44

recommend looking into crypto parties, where experienced users

explain infosec and help less experienced users set up tools like PGP,
and they exist all over the world. Oh, and don’t forget to cover your
webcam.

The Myth Of The
Anonymous Troll by Violet
Hargrave
As no shortage of articles will tell you, social media sites in general
suffer from a very serious “trolling problem.”
There’s a fair bit of confusion on what exactly having a “trolling
problem” means, with some very sheltered people confused at why
victims can’t “ignore a few people shouting irate nonsense at them.”
There is not nearly enough discussion of just how the disgusting
comments highlighted in articles on this topic are accompanied
by police battering down doors after receiving calls about “exe-
cuting hostages,” death threats made to elderly grandparents, child
protective services being called to investigate abuse allegations of
siblings/cousins/children, or the evergreen favorite of employers
being bombarded with calls and emails accusing victims of every
unsavory act under the sun until the victim is fired, if only to shut
them up.
While the more serious and life-endangering aspects of these ha-
rassment campaigns are hard to find easy solutions for, running
aground against woefully out of date police departments, or the
anonymity of disposable prepaid phones and spoofed e-mail ad-
dresses, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that social
media sites really need to institute policies where everyone must
register under their real name, because trying to hold anonymous
posters accountable is impossible.
Unfortunately, this seemingly common sense approach doesn’t
come close to addressing the real problems, as any victim of such an
attack can tell you, and as sociologists and abuse prevention experts
The Myth Of The Anonymous Troll by Violet Hargrave 43
constantly explain in public talks.

First off, the “trolls” aren’t anonymous. There are a few moves in the
serial abuser’s playbook which involve registering a huge number
of dummy accounts and using them all to send similar messages,
to conduct DDoS attacks or harass employers with “widespread
e-mail campaigns,” but those are inherently disposable single-shot
accounts, never to be used again whether they’re banned from a
service or not, and don’t make up a significant percentage of any
dedicated harassment campaign’s activity. The persistent sources
of abuse- the organizers, the stalkers, the performative types who
compete with each other to see who can make the most outrageous
posts or provoke the strongest reactions, almost always do so under
their real names, or at least under professional names they can’t
simply step away from.
In many cases, the people who orchestrate these sorts of campaigns
earn a living off it. Crowdfunding sites like Patreon are rife with
“internet personalities” who produce rambling 4 hour youtube
videos consisting of nothing but a neonazi staring into a camera
and delivering rambling monologues about the imagined crimes
of arbitrarily chosen victims, or reposting videos from feminists
and other social activists, pausing after every sentence to make
a rambling ‘counterpoint.’ This is a hugely lucrative business for
some, bringing in thousands of dollars each month45 between ads
and subscription based donations. This of course on top of the
financial backing millionaire neo-nazi Palmer Luckey46 .
Those who don’t have the savvy or the drive to monetize their
hatred need their names attached to satisfy their egos. Twitter in
particular is swarming with monstrous little scumbags who make
games out of harassment, keeping score by how many women
they’ve been blocked by, or how many tweets they got in before
a target stopped responding. Others, like ego driven misogynist
45
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/14/how-crowdfunding-helps-haters.html
46
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/22/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-
billionaire-secretly-funding-trump-s-meme-machine.html

Markus Persson47 , or genocide-minded bigots like Cathy Brennan48

seem to take perverse joy in how many of their followers will
attack a target after nothing but a pointed finger and display of
disapproval.
Meanwhile, it’s the victims of these attacks who suffer the most
from efforts to “combat anonymity.” Facebook’s real name policy49
is routinely abused to shut down the profiles of people of color,
trans people, and those posting under pseudonyms, specifically
to avoid the sort of harassment the policy ostensibly exists to
prevent. Trans women under the age of forty are exceptionally
likely to spend years exploring their true gender via roleplaying
games before coming out to friends and family, particularly online
games like World of Warcraft. Online gaming communities are
also notorious for violent queerphobia and misogyny50 , so when
Blizzard Entertainment’s instituted a policy tying accounts to legal
names, staggering numbers of trans players were suddenly exposed,
and women both cis and trans, already facing abuse and harassment
in-game, suddenly had to contend with their names being readily
available, to search for social media accounts and home addresses.
This in turn ties back to the most dangerous aspects of “trolling
problems.” Even without the aid of real name policies, uncovering
the contact information of victims in order to further escalation
is a huge priority of harassment campaigns. Take the case of
Sarah Nyberg51 , an unassuming young woman pseudonymously
discussing the transphobic comments she received on twitter to
a modest audience. After over a year of traditional abuse, “trolls”
compromised the security of the server hosting an old user image
of hers, discovered her real name, then used Facebook searches
47
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2016/05/22/mras-and-gamergaters-rejoice-
after-minecraft-guy-mansplains-mansplaining-uses-c-word/
48
http://theterfs.com/tag/cathy-brennan/
49
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_controversy
50
https://genderterror.com/2014/04/03/gaming-culture-and-safe-spaces/
51
https://medium.com/@srhbutts/i-m-sarah-nyberg-and-i-was-a-teenage-edgelord-
b8a460b27e10

and ancestry websites to research her entire extended family, and

publicly accuse her of sexually abusing her youngest living relative.
Such efforts to strip victims of their anonymity (often referred to

as “doxxing”) are frequently coordinated by means of dedicated
stalking sites, like 8chan’s /baphomet/board52 , or Kiwi Farms53 .
Social media sites routinely refuse to treat links to these sites as
harassment, claiming to only have jurisdiction over what they
personally host, but have similar excuses when people’s personal
information is directly exposed by way of their services.
Personally, I have been inundated for months with tweets from
users advertising their ties to Kiwi Farms, shouting names and
attaching photos of various people they believe me to secretly be.
When I report these, the response from Twitter is that they will
only remove the posts if I can provide them with photo IDs, proving
myself to actually be each of these random men. Random innocents
are being harassed now in an effort to attack me, and the only action
the platform is willing to take would be to confirm to my stalkers
that they finally guessed the right name if I provided verification.
How then, one might wonder, do these nefarious creeps avoid the
consequences of repeatedly, if not regularly, leading campaigns of
hatred and abuse against innocent people? Campaigns so severe as
to end careers, force people into hiding, and capture international
media attention? It isn’t that they’re anonymous. Perhaps their
rampages aren’t as high a priority as others? Not the case. Having
personally reviewed tens of thousands of cases of reported abuse,
first time and minor offenders are far more likely to see action taken
against them than high profile repeat offenders.
52
https://storify.com/a_man_in_black/baphomet
53
http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest-community-of-
stalkers.html

Perhaps then, there are mitigating circumstances? Exceptions for

people with a big claim to fame unrelated to their campaigns
of abuse? That would certainly explain why Persson gets a pass,
having sold the company behind Minecraft for an absurd sum
of money before retiring to his current lifestyle of bringing hell
down on women he gleefully refers to with the most unspeakable
obscenity in the country he currently calls home. It would also
cover the lack of consequences for Adam Baldwin, the C-list actor
who gave the most famous sustained campaign of abuse in history
its name by referring to what was then called “The Quinnspiracy”
with the hashtag #gamergate54 . Perhaps we forgive all the bizarre
abuse and photos of squirrels hanging upside down by their testicles
because we remember him as Jayne on Firefly?
If that were the case, it still wouldn’t let Brennan off the hook.
Her entire life revolves around the vindictive, life-endangering
persecution of trans women and has for years. And it most certainly
wouldn’t excuse the actual creator of Gamergate, Eron Gjoni, a
man whose entire claim to fame in life is recruiting an army of
honest to goodness neo-nazis to punish a woman he used to punch
in the face for dumping him, and continuing to direct their attacks
as they grew into a general purpose hate group responsible for
so much senseless abuse and ruination that the governments of
several countries have drafted new legislation in direct response.
One would reasonably assume that at the very least, he’d be
suspended from the social media sites specifically called out in
the restraining order issued against him. Yet there he is, under his
real name, running crowdfunded efforts to continue tormenting the
same victims.
Twitter considers stalking and abuse to be examples of “active

engagement” that drive ad revenue, and outright reward some of
54
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy

the worst offenders with special treatment. While they eventually

made a big public display of suspending the primary account of
Milo Yiannopoulos, an offender so over the top, blatant, and clearly
dangerous as to essentially be a cartoon villain, this was done
purely as a symbolic gesture in the face of massive blowback against
twitter as a company for his campaign against actress Leslie Jones55 .
Prior to his banning, Yiannopoulos was the specific subject of many
meetings, discussing literally thousands of clear cut cases where
he exhibited behavior unacceptable by any standard. Willfully
endangering the lives of women he suspects are trans, attacking
their character with completely fabricated stories of drug abuse
and child endangerment, sharing sexually explicit photos of teens,
encouraging people to visit child porn sites, and once distributing
a photo of a victim’s dead sister with a nazi flag added to the
background.
The sad truth of the matter is that social media sites actively enjoy
hosting these sorts of serial harassment campaigns. Publicly of
course, they constantly issue statements to the contrary, affirming
their commitment to safety and decency, and announcing formal
partnerships with anti-abuse organizations to help clean house.
Given that, it would frankly be absurdly cynical to speculate that
they secretly love their hordes of trolls.
As it happens though, we don’t need to speculate. Confidentially
prevents me getting into the specifics, but the details of meetings
conducted within these “partnerships” reveal what sorts of high
profile abuse cases have been brought to their attention behind
closed doors, the pathetic excuses given not to act on them, and
the honest reasons that come through when those come out. Many
of the sordid details are also publicly available.
55
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/07/21/what-it-takes-
to-get-banned-from-twitter/

Reddit’s founders have admitted, in public discussions on their

internal operations, to introducing “gold” as a way to fan the flames
of abuse on the site while profiting off it, and chose to oust a
CEO56 rather than shut down forums openly dedicated to white
supremacy, with outright unspeakable names57 .
Twitter considers these actions, and the torrents of crowd sourced
hate that follow vital to the site’s profitability, generating huge page
view spikes and accompanying ad exposures, going as far as to
promote Yiannopoulos’ “articles” as “top news stories” relating to
his targets.
Facebook is notorious for enabling bigotry and silencing activists58
through its features, blaming it on flaws of the system, but actively
patrols for even the slightest sleights against dangerous bigots59 .
The problem has never been that anonymity allows abusive people
to avoid consequences. There simply aren’t consequences for abu-
sive people.
56
https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_thank_you/
57
http://gawker.com/how-reddit-became-a-worse-black-hole-of-violent-racism-
1690505395
58
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/12/facebook-blocks-shaun-king-
black-lives-matter
59
http://the-orbit.net/metaphoricalpenis/2016/04/27/cathy-brennan-fake-goth/

Digital Security for Trans*
Communities by Norman
Shamas & Anonymous Trans*
Activists
I want to focus on reality. The reality trans*60 communities in the
US face every day related to their identities.
This isn’t about possible threats from nation states or how to protect
against a surveillance state that more often targets marginalized
communities. It is about lived realities. Due to constraints, it does
not include all realities or situations that trans* communities face.61
Most importantly, this is meant as a starting point. There aren’t easy
answers and, sometimes, the questions haven’t even been asked.
To get started, let’s go back to January 2014 when Grantland
published an article that outed a trans woman62 . This article was
nominally about a golf putter and its claims of scientific superiority.
However, the article turned into an investigation into the creator
of the putter. Investigations that dove into her background and
ultimately ‘uncovered’ her transition.63 All of this was part of an
60
Editor’s Note: Trans* is an umbrella term used by some to refer to all of the iden-
tities within the gender identity spectrum e.g. transgender, transfeminine, transmasculine,
bigender, androgynous etc.
61
By nature of my experiences, I am talking primarily about trans* communities in the
US. The term “trans*” in and of itself is complicated and problematic, especially when talking
about global communities that had unique identities prior to the categorization of specific
people as “trans*.”
62
http://grantland.com/features/a-mysterious-physicist-golf-club-dr-v/
63
I won’t go into a critique of the Grantland article and its institutional failure here.
However, the response from the editor and critique from a reporter at ESPN, Grantland’s
parent company provide no confidence that Grantland, as a media organization, understands
concerns with identity for trans* people.
Digital Security for Trans* Communities by Norman Shamas & Anonymous
Trans* Activists 50
article that was meant to evaluate the claims of the science of the
putter, not the scientist.64
One of the most terrifying parts of this article is that this type of
investigation into a person’s background is an acceptable practice
in journalism if someone becomes a ‘public’ figure. These types
of investigations are also an ever-present threat for trans* people
through background checks by employers, financial institutions,
health insurance providers, and other social institutions.
This threat from background investigations makes identity man-

agement, privacy, and security difficult for trans* communities. It
is this reality that remains excluded from digital security resources–
even ones that claim to directly address the needs of trans* commu-
nities.65
Let’s go through two examples to show what identity manage-
ment for a trans* person is like. These examples are based on
real situations, but are composites of multiple examples to protect
anonymity.
Case 1: Closeted Trans* Person
The Internet provides some great opportunities for closeted trans*
persons to explore new identities (as adage from 1993 goes, “on the
Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”66 ). However, there has been
an increasing trend in social media and other online communities
64
This sentence purposefully borrows language used early on in the article when Caleb
Hannon introduces the first communication with Dr. V. In that communication she clearly
states her willingness to be interviewed only if the focus is on the science, not the scientist.
Her reasons were explicitly noted as concern for safety.
65
This article should not be seen as bashing any of the resources named below. They
are good resources and provide a lot of helpful information. However, they are not directed
towards trans* persons and do not directly address their needs for digital security.
66
This adage comes from a July 5, 1993 cartoon by Peter Steiner published in the New
Yorker

Trans* Activists 51
to verify identities and prevent anonymous users. One prominent

example is Facebook’s ‘real name’ policy. Often times these policies
require submission of government issued identification in order to
reinstate an account or verify identity.
Trans* people face a great deal of emotional distress due, in part,
to a fragmentation of and/or non-representative identities. For a
closeted trans* person, this emotional distress is present, but the
comfort that comes from coming out publicly as trans* might not
be present–only a feeling that a different type of identity provides
help.67
In these situations, one thing that a closeted trans* person can do
is to experiment with identities and identity presentations. Their
digital identity can be molded to how they want to be perceived
with little to no relation to their birth identity. They might even
transition into this identity.
Now, imagine you are a closeted trans* person using Airbnb, a social
room rental service, while traveling. This decision arose out of cost
and the ability to present yourself how you want to your host.
You are careful in the hosts you select and use it when traveling
with trusted friends to rent out an ‘entire home’ to prevent any
potentially awkward encounters with the host.
Then, out of the blue, Airbnb asks you to verify your identity shortly
before you begin a trip.68 The only way to verify your identity is to
send in a government issued ID69 to their 3rd party vendor, Jumio.
If you don’t verify your identity, then your current reservations will
be canceled and your account will be deactivated.
What do you do in this situation? You know your ID does not have
67
It is also important to note that a trans* person might choose to not publicly identify
as trans*. Even though the example focuses on trans* people who will likely transition, the
situation is still applicable to trans* people who choose not to be public about their identity.
68
According to Airbnb, they have been asking random users to verify their identity since
April 30, 2013.
69
For more information about Airbnb’s verification process, see their help center page
on it.

Trans* Activists 52
the same information you’ve included in your Airbnb profile. If

your account gets deactivated, then you will have to book through
another service at much higher financial cost.
In this situation, the biggest concern is around being outed. Who
knows who has access to verification information at Jumio and
Airbnb. Sending your data to Jumio would require some explana-
tion of name differences without the guarantee that it would be
accepted. Is that information available to Jumio’s other clients who
use them to verify identities? Even if your account gets reactivated,
will Airbnb protect your privacy and rights as a trans* user?70
The available resources I have reviewed do not provide any as-
sistance in the creation and maintenance of identities in a way
that is trans* inclusive (in some instances despite their claims71 ).
The threat model that is addressed in these resources is typically
the creation of a new/fake identity to insulate activists attacked
by online trolls and misogynistic movements, such as Gamergate.
While a valid and important threat model, it is very different from
the needs for trans* people.
In The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy, Violet Blue provides some
information about protecting data when sending in an identity
document (ID). However, it is under the assumption the service you
are sending your ID to already has your information. In particular,
Blue is writing about the need to send in government ID to get
information removed from people searcher sites.
In addition, the available guides are primarily written for laptop or
70
Despite ads and marketing material directed towards the US trans* community (e.g.
Airbnb’s 2015 ad for the ESPYs in support of Caitlin Jenner, which is now removed from
YouTube), their practices seem to indicate a lack of understanding of and training against
trans* discrimination. See, for example, their handling of a host who rejected Shadi Petosky.
71
Perhaps the most egregious example of this is Tactical Technology Collective (TTC)’s
“Zen and the art of making tech work for you” guide, which explicitly claims to be for trans*
activists. However, they use language that can be hostile to trans* identities. In the context
of preventing online trolling, creating a fake identity for use in online social media makes
sense. However, it does not apply to online trans* identities in general, despite claims to do
so by the creators of the guide. Even after bringing up this language issue, TTC and the guide
creators stand by its claim to be applicable for general trans* identities online.

Trans* Activists 53
computer use. Some of the guides will go so far as to recommend

installing a new operating system that are oriented for security
through isolation–a big request of an average user.
The reality of being trans* in the US includes lost economic oppor-
tunities. Part of this is related to marginalization and bias in the
hiring process. But, there is also the fact that hormone therapy and
gender confirmation surgery cost a lot of money and are not always
covered by insurance.
What all of this equates to is a different perspective. One that these
guides ignore in their framing (including intended threats, access
to technology, etc) and intended audience.
Case 2: Transitioned Trans* Person
This second example might seem more familiar. It is the story of
a person who has transitioned and is no longer using their birth
name in public.72 Depending on their situation, they might have
undergone hormone therapy and/or gender confirmation surgery.
They have removed all the pictures and references to their birth
identity that they could. There is still information connecting them
to their past–snippets, like where they went to school or shared
connections–because they didn’t want to create a fake identity, but
transition into a new one.
A number of years after transitioning, someone posts on social
media asking if this trans* person is someone they knew from high
school and uses their birth name. This is extremely concerning,
because even though they have transitioned, they don’t want people
knowing their birth identity lest it be used as a form of harass-
ment.73 What are they to do? What could they have done to prevent
this?
72
In these cases, the trans* person could still be closeted with certain groups, such as
family.
73
A recent example of this is when hate speaker Milo Yiannopoulos publicly harassed a
trans woman at an event he was invited to speak at by the University of Wisconsin.

Trans* Activists 54
At the moment, there seems to be a lack of resources to address this

need. To complicate issues, in the U,S there is no federal standard
for something like a name change–the procedure(s) vary by the
state. Many states require the publication of a name change, putting
trans* people at high risk.74 For example, Washington, DC removed
this requirement after it led to the deaths of trans* people.75
At a minimum, any resource on digital/information security for
trans* people should recognize these legal requirements, the related
risk, and provide information or resources to get more information.
In addition, organizations focusing on policy in the digital security
and privacy space, should ally with trans* focused legal organiza-
tions, such as the Transgender Law Center76 , to jointly advocate
for reform of legal and digital laws or policies that endanger trans*
people.77
Suggestions
At this time, the digital security and privacy community has largely
ignored trans* communities.78 Despite trans* community members,
the community itself is typically absent from diversity initiatives or
community leadership roles. There are also very few trainers in the
community who are trans* or work with trans* communities.
Despite this lack of representation, the community claims to be ad-
dressing the needs of trans* people. In my experience, that is not the
74
While I learned about this from my work with activists and organizations, Nico Lang
published a good piece of the name change process(es).
75
This was learned from my experience and conversations with trans* activists and
organizations in Washington, DC.
76
https://transgenderlawcenter.org/
77
For example, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) partnered with the Transgender
Law Center to reform Facebook’s ‘real name’ policy in addittion to their piece on the
concerns with Facebook’s policy.
78
I would like to recognize Aspiration for their consideration of trans* attendees and
concerns at their Nonprofit Software Development Summit. It is the only event I have
attended in the digital security and privacy (or related) community that has required
pronouns on the name tags. Even small steps of inclusion, like normalizing pronoun
exchange, are missing from most events.

Trans* Activists 55
case. Below are a few suggestions to reduce trans* marginalization

in digital security and privacy.
• Don’t claim to be speaking to or for the trans* community

(or any group) if you have not interacted or worked with
them. While I would think that this is an obvious point, there
are numerous examples of the digital security and privacy
community doing just that for trans* people.
• Stop using LGBTQIA+: refer to the specific community
or communities that are represented. While connected to
the previous point, it deserves explicit mention that using
LGBTQIA+ (or any variation) is inherently reductive and
marginalizing. I understand this is language that is used
in policy and by donors–so it will still be in use. But the
reality, in the US and abroad, is that LGBTI79 typically refers
only to gay men. Instead of creating a false impression of
shared goals and needs, explicitly state which communities
are represented or discussed.
• Build communities that are trans* inclusive. Inclusion and
which groups are represented are choices made by a com-
munity. When ‘diversity’ initiatives and community events
do not include or consider trans* people, they are not trans*
inclusive. At a minimum, ensure you have a code of conduct
that addresses typical forms of harassment and anxiety trans*
people face (e.g., intentional misgendering, anxiety around
which bathroom to use).
• Fund work with trans* communities across the globe (in-
cluding in the US). At the moment little to no funding goes
to projects, tools, or organizations working primarily with
trans* communities. Some reasons for this are restrictions to
funding work to particular locations and funding descriptions
that more readily accept another secure messaging tool than a
79
I use the acronym LGBTI here because it tends to be the most ‘inclusive’ version of
the acronym used by donors, policy makers, and human rights organizations.

Trans* Activists 56
trans*-focused policy organization. If the digital security and

privacy community wants to support trans* communities, as
it claims to do, provide them with financial support.
Taking the above suggestions is not enough. The digital security

and privacy community needs to start recognizing and addressing
threat models that are relevant to trans* communities.
The trans* communities that I have worked with do not always
share concerns or even legal and social risks. Due to the lack of
tools or resources aimed at trans* communities, I have found digital
security and privacy to require a largely human approach to risk
management. In other words, something that varies from person to
person.
A good start to building tools and resources that are trans* inclu-
sive is to recognize the complexity of threat modeling for trans*
communities.
By taking a trans* inclusive approach to Facebook’s real name
policy, a form of identity verification, it is clear that the issue is
not just with what is considered a ‘real’ name, but also the notion
that a government ID is the only way to verify an identity.80 81
Trans* inclusive digital security and privacy inherently means an
expansion of how digital identity is discussed. At the moment,
the focus is on rigid sandboxing through tools like Qubes OS82 .
While Qubes has a place in digital security and privacy for trans*
communities, tools that allow allow more flexible and permeable
80
By including this example of Facebook’s real name policy I am not implying that
people did not take a trans* inclusive approach to campaigning against Facebook’s policy.
81
See Case 1, above, for a representative anecdote related to this aspect of identity
management.
82
https://www.qubes-os.org

Trans* Activists 57
identity boundaries and resources that help manage identities and

data that already exist and are potentially outside the user’s control
are also needed.
These suggestions are not the only ways for digital security and
privacy to start addressing needs of and building new tools and
resources for trans* communities.
I encourage others from trans* communities and who work with
trans* communities to speak up and join the conversation to in-
crease the trans* inclusive tools and resources available.

Where Do We Go From
Here? by Sarah Jamie Lewis
I choose to believe that I can live in a world where I don’t have to
fear.
We saw signs many years back, we see it now, we will see it

tomorrow.
As the media dances an ever more ominous tone it it is clear that
fascism is alive, it is strong and, remember, it is always good for the
economy.
Progress on trans rights, gay rights, civil rights, human rights will
halt, and reverse. The train has been running on borrowed tracks.
Across the world we are seeing the rise of radical right wing
organizations and, in many cases, we have seen them be given the
reigns of government.
What a government is powerful enough to give, it is powerful
enough to take. We can no longer afford to have optimism in
progress being a one way street. The right to self determination,
the right to build and raise a family, the right to healthcare are all
being eroded, especially for those in queer communities.
Climate change, human displacement and the inevitable famine and
war that follow them are now almost a certainty. We are over the
edge, through the looking glass and there is no turning back.
As I write this there are multiple pieces of legislation in tens of
countries that roll back or simply oppress those who are, or are
seen to be, non-cishetnormative. Laws that would make it difficult
for transgender people to obtain any kind of healthcare; laws that
deny the equal rights to non-heterosexual couples; laws that make
Where Do We Go From Here? by Sarah Jamie Lewis 59
it impossible for polyamorous partners to visit their loved ones in

hospital; laws that ignore or deny non-binary people the right to
self determination.
As a society we have reached a fork in the road. One of those
forks might see us grow, and love and explore this vast and ancient
universe. The other will see our home destroyed, our civilization
reduced to ashes before it has a chance to spread its wings.
As a community we either live, fully and without exception or
oppression, or we die.
I choose to believe that we can grow, and love. I choose to believe
that I can live in a world where I don’t have to fear holding my
partners’ hand, where I don’t have to fear for my friends around
the world.
I choose to believe that I can live in a world where I don’t have to
fear.
We have heard stories from a vast cross-section of humanity who
also intersect with properties society has chosen to stigmatize, os-
tracize. They, we, I do not have the luxury of waiting for humanity
to decide to be better.
This is real life, and there is no next time around.
But, ultimately, all of that was just words. We need action. We need
infrastructure.
We need to Start Exercising Unwaivering Compassion: There will
be calls for unity. These should be ignored. The liberals will seek
to improve the economy while turning a blind eye to the abuses of
power to come. Some will fight the traditional political fight, and
might even win, but not before huge damage has been done to our
families, our friends and our planet. Throwing a minority under

the bus for a chance at incremental economic progress is bullshit

and anyone who advocates for such is not an ally. There can be
no compromises when it comes to the assertion of queer rights and
lives.
We need to Fund Crisis Orgs: With our time, and with our money.
The next few years are going to be rough for many groups. No
government is likely to continue funding their efforts for long. We
need to understand that it will get worse before it gets better, and
we need to invest effort into bringing as many people as we can
along with us. We need to provide community resources for those
who feel trapped by their existence. Suicide hotlines, relief shelters,
free clinics, as well as community grants and funds are all essential
to ensuring our future.
We need to Start Enforcing Consent: We are all different and I
believe that we are all capable of love and compassion. Systems of
power are design and structured to remove agency, to divide, and
to rule. The only way I can see for all humans on this planet to be
free, to have agency is for us to withdraw our consent from these
systems, or at least, to start enforcing it.
This means using tools like Signal83 to encrypt our phone calls and
messages, this means lobbying existing systems to implement ways
of blocking and otherwise withdrawing consent to communicate.
We need to Build, Improve and Use Alternative Information In-
frastructures: Rulers can only rule if they have information, about
events, about people. Prevent mass spying through encryption and
anonymity technologies like Signal and Tor84 .
Without information it is impossible to rule effectively without
consent.
We need to make these technologies better, to make it possible for
abused spouses, sex workers, closeted children and everyone else
83
https://whispersystems.org/
84

on this planet to find them and to use them. A tool is nothing if it

is not usable.
We need more. We need to decentralize the media, decentralize the
news and to decentralize the networks. We need better tools for
organizing, ones not controlled by a central corporation, ones that
are private by default.
We need to tell our stories. We need to support each other.
I don’t intend to go quietly into the darkness. Neither should you.
Existence is Resistance.
Welcome to the Future.

Mascherari Press
Mascherari Press85 publishes unique insights on anonymity & pri-
vacy to understand how they affect the lives of those that rely on
them and how to build new and better tools that empower people
through them.
In order to understand what to build, we need to understand people
and to understand people, we need to hear their stories.
When we started this project we didn’t have a good idea of what
the end product would be, but we knew we wanted to achieve two
goals:
1. Tell untold stories that help empower marginalized commu-

nities
2. Pay authors to tell their stories - too many publications profit
off of the stories of marginalized people without feeding any
of that back into the communities.
What we have presented in this book is, we hope, the start of a long
line of publishing projects that meet these goals.
Thank you for reading.
-Mascherari Press
85
https://mascherari.press

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Queer Privacy

Essays From The Margins Of Society

Sarah Jamie Lewis

This version was published on 2017-06-02

This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons

Acknowledgements & Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

About This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

About The Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv

Who Should Read This Book? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

What Is Queer Privacy? by Sarah Jamie Lewis . . . . . . 1

Privacy, Perversion, and Power by Ada Collins . . . . . . 4

What’s In A Name? by Kath Rella . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Exploring Polyamory in Private by Audrey Howard . . . 22

Skylar by Avi Zajac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Privacy On The Margins by Morgan Potts . . . . . . . . . 36

The Myth Of The Anonymous Troll by Violet Hargrave . 42

Digital Security for Trans* Communities by Norman Shamas

Where Do We Go From Here? by Sarah Jamie Lewis . . 58

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

• Audrey Howard is a graphic designer and sometimes-writer.

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

Privacy is the right to consent.

Many modern companies and organizations promote software to

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

Because of this we have been forced to adapt less secure tools to

Queer Privacy, therefore, is about understanding the challenges

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

I wake up at 6:15, feed the kids and drop my kindergartener off. I

I do let my female side play on special occasions. When I’m high

I am pansexual9 and non-binary, the most non-identifying identity

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

we’re just a bunch of nerds who find it flattering to be considered

I am a single mom to two young kids. Yes, I mop up spilled yogurt

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

a play session. I control my partner, I hurt my partner, and I am

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

• If anyone in the kink community recognizes me, it will

As my imagination brought me to new heights of non-binary

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

with Alfred Kinsey. Steward treated queerness as a vocation at a

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

My parents, though traditional and working-class, were keen that

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

Amateur material and independent studios do produce responsible

Sadly, The British government have declared a proxy war against

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

Could you honestly say that if you had the potential to

Even if we trust the government and every single employee of each

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

forums, on the Deep Web, or Pastebin. Millions of users of sites such

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

life. We should all have a right to a private life. Our government

Since we cannot trust the government to behave responsibly, nor

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

from the apparently feeble minds of British viewers.29

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society

out what to call genitals so that children would understand. This

We must come back to the privacy argument, as well. Adult sites

Queer Privacy: Essays From The Margins Of Society